Looking back on this past year of Manhattan Music columns, I’m struck by a misnomer: The term “classical music” can’t possibly cover 500 years of compositions, a history that embraces every form of human expression from the beatific to the bittersweet, the bellicose to the bacchanalian. With so much to choose from, picking “the best” Read More
Wednesday, June 16
* CBS News legend Dan Rather was one of the few people to get his hands on an advance copy of the hotly awaited and tightly guarded 975-page memoir My Life , by former President Bill Clinton. So what’s the verdict, Mr. Rather?
“Maybe he didn’t come totally, absolutely clean with Read More
Theodore Rex , by Edmund Morris. Random House, 864 pages, $35.
Almost exactly one century before Sept. 11, an act of terror rocked the state of New York and struck at the heart of American government. On Sept. 5, 1901, as President William McKinley was speaking on world trade at the Pan-American Exposition in Buffalo, Read More
It’s a good story, but Dutch wouldn’t have approved. Not that Dutch would have cared about the way Edmund Morris has mixed fiction and fact together in his new memoir of the nation’s 40th President. Old Dutch, of course, wasn’t too particular about facts himself.
But Ronald (Dutch) Reagan had a serene, baffling, even maddening Read More
